The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Take five

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    At the “happy at work” workshops, we always talk about the value of breaks. Of having five minutes a day, where you’re not working, talking, mailing or phoning. A non-time where you can become centered and grounded and aware of yourself and your surroundings. At the last workshop, a participant told me about the norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen who has written a book called The tyranny of the moment, in which he argues that we are loosing our pauses. He says, that it is in the silent spaces between doing things that we can take on new ideas and contemplate change.

    A quote:

    Thomas Eriksen argues that slow time – private periods where we are able to think and correspond coherently without interruption – is now one of the most precious resources we have, and it is becoming a major political issue. Since we are now theoretically “online” 24 hours a day, we must fight for the right to be unavailable – the right to live and think more slowly. It is not only that working hours have become longer – Eriksen also shows how the logic of this new information technology has, in the space of just a few years, permeated every area of our lives. This is equally true for those living in poorer parts of the globe usually depicted as outside the reaches of the information age, as well as those in the West.

  • Karaoke

    How about a german Gipsy Kings Shockwave karaoke challenge?

  • At the chaordic conference

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    I just hosted a session at the chaordic conference here in Aarhus. I talked about the practice of chaordic organizations, based on my experiences from Enterprise Systems, Arena and the happy at work project. I set myself the challenge of doing the presentation based solely upon practices – what is it that we do (or did) in these chaordic organizations. No values, no principles, no beliefs – just hardcore actual practices that will help a chaordic organization emerge. Not that these are the only practices that will support chaordism (chaordicity?), they’re what’s worked for me. This also gave me a chance to think about what the practices are, and here’s what I came up with:
    Open space meetings
    This is the backbone of the organization. Regular meetings which are open to the whole organizaton, This is where big decisions get made, and where responsibility gets delegated.

    Workgroups
    This is where the actual work gets done. Each workgroup is defined at the open space meeting, and then goes and does the work. A workgroup may have a budget and a charter, and as long as they stay within that, they don’t need to ask permission – they can do what they want. If they need to exceed what was decided at the ope space meeting, they must ask for permission to do so at the nect open space meeting. Workgroups are open to anyone who’d like to participate.

    Wiki
    Since decision making and work is distributed among meny people, it’s important to have a place to centralize information. We use a wiki site for this. If you don’t know what that is, you can read more about it here. Each ongoing project has a wiki-page with all the relevant information, and the names of the people working on it, so you can contact them if you have any questions.

    Try it!
    In a distributed organization, it’s very important to cultivate an attitude of “Try it!”, meaning that when decisions are made, you don’t need to analyze everything. Rather than planning for three months and then coming out with “the perfect plan”, you can outline some alternatives and then decide to try one. It may not work, but then you can try something else. No decisions are set in stone, if something doesn’t work, we’ll do it differently.

    Yes, and…
    Yes, and… is a very powerful method for meeting other people. It means saying Yes to new ideas and then adding your own input. It’s about not automatically saying no, which can otherwise be very tempting. You can read more about it here.

    In my experience, these are the practices that have led to a chaordic organization. The big advantages of these organizations has been that they are:
    Alive – people are enthusiastic and energetic
    Efficient – Stuff gets done fast and well, because people work on the stuff they like
    Dynamic – They can adapt to different situations
    Fun – They’re great places to be!

  • Neuroscience on the job

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    This interview with Dr. Joseph LeDoux explains some basics of neuroscience and then goes on to examine what some of this may mean on the job.

    In truth, most of what we do, we do unconsciously, and then rationalize the decision consciously after the fact. This doesn?t mean we do everything important without proper thought. Thought and emotion can both take place outside the consciousness. Consciousness is just the place where we find out about what we are thinking and feeling.

  • Voxpop

    The happy at work project went out on the streets of Copenhagen and asked people “What makes you happy at work?”

    The answers we got were funny and interesting, and if you understand danish you can see the best of them in this 1,5 min video clip. A big thank you to Charlotte Slemming for putting this together.

  • Hektor, the swiss graffiti robot

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    Gizmodo put me onto this extremely cool swiss graffiti robot, which is basically a spray can, a computer, two steppper motors and some string. Check out the video of the robot painting a work of art for an exhibition, it’s a sight to behold.

    Reading about that project made we want to be a geek again. I have a long past in the IT business, and there’s just something about a project that cool and that useless that makes some part of me want to do it. To work out all the details involved ant then finally see it in action. To slave loooong nights over obscure little problems, that I probably created myself in the first place. To disappear into a process so intense and so goal-oriented and so clear that sleep, food, politics, TV, movies and keeping up a normal social life take the back seat to fixing the next bug. And the next.

  • Chaordic gathering in Denmark

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    Next week (Monday to Wednesday), the Kaospilots are self-organizing a conference about chaordic organizations. The term chaordic was put forth by Dee Hock the man behind VISA in his excellent book The chaordic age.

    To me, the implications of complexity theory (chaos theory) in business are most aptly realized in the concept of chaordic organizations, organizations that live in the thin and dynamic borderland between chaos and order. I look forward to meeting some of the people behind The Chaordic Commons, and to sharing my experiences in exploring chaordic thinking and practices.

  • Confessions of a bookie

    Tucsons local bookie, The Baron, wants to quit, and the Tucson weekly has a very interesting and funny article about it:
    The Baron wants out. He’s had enough. Enough of the all-nighters, the booze, the bad habits and most of all, the degenerate gamblers–the DGs, as he calls ’em–and their worthless excuses when it comes time to pay up.

    “It’s a gut wrench, this life,” the local bookie says with a shrug as he orders a White Russian to calm his stomach.

    This quote caught my eye:
    “Men don’t bet to win,” he says. “They bet to almost lose.”

    What he means: The gambling high only lasts while the action is in question. If you’re up 50 points at halftime, you’re no longer even interested in watching the game. But if you’re only winning by a field goal, you’re glued to the set, cursing every blown play and turnover, gleefully howling with every first down.

    That’s kinda interesting, because it could be part of the drive behind your typical entrepreneur also. As long as a project is new and shiny and in doubt, it’s interesting. Once it really gets going and it’s a sure thing, it’s no longer interesting.

    “Men don’t bet to win, they bet to almost lose.” That’s poetry.

  • An Economy for Giving Everything Away

    Chris linked to this text a while ago, and I’ve been chewing my way through it since then. It’s kinda long and full of important thoughts on living a life of giving, illustrated through the Open Source movement and through the life of the author himself, one Andrius Kulikauskas, the proprietor of Minciu Sodas. Minciu Sodas describe themselves as “an open laboratory for serving and organizing independent thinkers”, and surfing their website reveals a high occurrence of words like fractal, global, innovation and network. I have no idea what they’re about apart from that. Maybe they’re a fractal, global, innovation network :o)

    Anyway the article makes a starting point in the decision that “I accept the idea that I should give everything away”, and then examines what implications this may have on how you work and live. One conclusion: Wealth is relationships.

    This is really interesting to me, since one of the basic principles of the “Happy at work” project is that we’re open source. Everything we create, all the knowledge we gather is available to anyone for free. We’re about giving happiness away. Read it!!

  • Better meetings

    One of my passions is better meetings. Meetings can be productive, energizing, creative and fun. Or they can suck the life out of you faster than a brief stay in vacuum – without a space suit.

    I stumbled upon a very simple and effective format that I’ve been using for shorter meetings with fewer people. Say 1-2 hours and up to 6 -8 people.

    At the start of the meeting everybody who has a topic writes it on a piece of paper, announces it briefly, and places that piece of paper on the table. When no more topics come up, dialogue begins. We look at the potential topics, and decide where to start. People can break into groups or not as they choose, most of the time we tackle all of the topics together. Once a topic has been dealt with, you can put that piece of paper aside.

    The good thing about this format is that it takes almost no time to do the agenda planning, and the agenda is visible to everyone, as is the progress since the number of outstanding items on the table keeps shrinking.

    I’m not sure why, but this works much better than writing down the agenda on a piece of paper. I should probably note that I use this format with people who are already used to open space meetings – that may be part of the reason why it works for us. Try it!

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